Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1900

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3088644

1527-1900

Janet Chernela,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

The absence of native voices in historical accounts of the Americas is due, at least in part, to the canons of historic scholarship. The present volume sets out to correct this by gleaning new interpretations from conventional sources such as clerical records, military archives, civil registries, court documents, and official correspondence, as well as unconventional resources such as maps, ethnographies, and oral accounts.The book's eight chapters examine nearly four centuries of assimilation, accommodation, and resistance (1500–1890) as the Portuguese colony and, later, the Brazilian state expanded inland. Two chapters take up the aldeia, or mission village system, the systematic resettlement of indigenous populations into agricultural communities where they could be governed, groomed in European habits, trained as laborers, and converted to Christianity. The first of these, by Alida Metcalf, considers the sixteenth-century arrival of the Jesuits to claim that “the mission village was not imposed from Lisbon or Rome, but evolved on the ground in Brazil” (p. 30). Metcalf reviews early Jesuit policies as they emerged from theological interpretation, practical considerations, and a commitment to evangelism based on Thomist and Augustinian principles. She considers, for example, changing Jesuit policies regarding indigenous polygyny and cousin marriage.Metcalf also addresses Jesuit attitudes toward the colonial practice of Indian slavery. Unlike Africa, where conversion to Christianity was mobilized to justify slavery, prominent clerics in the Americas opposed slavery on the grounds that it impeded evangelism (p. 37). Given the importance of Metcalf's claims to the history of the church in Latin America, however, I find it problematic that she never considers the Jesuits of 1550s Brazil within the larger ambit of international debates among clergy over New World slavery. Nor does Metcalf compare the Portuguese mission villages to similar programs, known as reducciones, that began in the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1567 and extended throughout the Spanish Americas. If the mission village “evolved on the ground in Brazil,” it served as a far-reaching model for all Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the New World.Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida examines the aldeia system two centuries later to argue that its indigenous inhabitants displayed forms of agency not before recognized by researchers. Notwithstanding forced resettlement and labor recruitment, the indigenous residents, Almeida argues, were able to shape the aldeia communities in keeping with their own values and identities. By mining unconventional sources, she documents a number of revenue-generating activities by indigenous residents. The significance of such data, however, lies in revelations about the aldeia system's demise. From the middle to the end of the eighteenth century, the colonial economy radically shifted away from church monopolies and toward secularism and privatization. Reforms between 1757 and 1798 stripped the missions of their monopoly over indigenous labor and brought about the beginnings of a wage-based indigenous labor force and the conversion of indigenous land to private holdings. Aldeias that persisted into the nineteenth century did so in fundamentally altered forms.Barbara Sommer addresses the same period for late colonial Pará, yet she emphasizes social and political mobility among postaldeia populations. Relying on anthropological accounts and rare correspondence, Sommer takes up the eighteenth-century creation of an indigenous elite who furthered their own interests through strategies that tied them to colonial administrators. The chapter makes an important contribution to a growing literature on indigenous agency. Two chapters take up settler society in the mining regions of colonial Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo. The chapter by Hal Langfur and Maria Leônia Chaves de Resende documents the way that former military captives and aldeia residents escaped to mining towns, where they lived under the tutelage of colonists. By artfully negotiating identity, the authors show, descendants of captives became fully incorporated into local social and cultural life (p. 151).Like Langfur and Resende, Judy Bieber is concerned with expeditions into the expanding western frontier. She takes up the long pursuit of the resistant Botocudo during the Brazilian empire (1822–1889). The independence of the Botocudo has been well documented; Bieber draws on military records and ethnographic accounts to provide an original analysis that sets the policies of the state against the lifeways and interests of the Indians. In the only chapter by an anthropologist, Neil Whitehead surveys early European competition for resources and native loyalties in the northeastern Amazon. He describes how English, Irish, Dutch, and French traders established important partnerships with the region's indigenous peoples, providing them with metal tools in exchange for hardwoods, dyes, and other forest products. By contrast, Portuguese colonization, he tells us, proceeded slowly, limited to military expeditions to secure the region and control the indigenous populations.Mary Karasch's chapter provides an important metadiscussion of the book's main problematic: reconstructing an indigenous history from colonial records. “The narration of Indian policy in Goiás,” Karasch writes, “is a one-sided affair in historical documentation. Rarely does the Indian perspective appear in official records” (p. 199). Karasch exercises appropriate scrutiny when she notes that the colonial record cannot be taken at face value. By tempering reports from Lisbon with on-the-ground realities, she recounts how the Goiás gold rush hindered missionary activity “as priests took up mining with their own enslaved Africans, acquired fortunes in gold, and returned to Lisbon” (pp. 200–201). She points out that unless financial resources and efforts were committed to them, official policies were rarely implemented. Moreover, Karasch concludes, “the very failure of Luso-Brazilian Indian policy (i.e., to commit significant financial resources and administrative talent to official efforts to settle down, civilize, and Christianize the Indians) in part permitted [Native American] survival” (p. 200).In the fitting final chapter, Karasch and David McCreery discuss resistance to slavery and pacification by native groups of central Brazil to argue that “indigenous sociopolitical structures … made it possible for some of them to endure in spite of warfare, conquest, and enslavement” (p. 199).Despite its title, and because of the methodological constraints recognized by its contributors, this book is less about “native Brazil” than it is about what Richard White called the “middle ground,” a terrain forged between colonizers (colonists, missionaries, and government authorities) and Indians (husbands, wives, chiefs, shamans, and so on) on which opposing sides affected one another, shared experiences, formed alliances, and fought over freedoms, territories, meanings, and lives. That said, the authors bring important new research methodologies and interpretations to situate the Indian as an active agent within this shared history. The extent to which they capture the elusive dialogue between the indigenous community and the state is a model for historians of the Americas. The book makes a superb addition to the field known as the “new Indian history.”